Wednesday, May 27, 2015

I’m really pissed
off about the stuff that falls on my garden, leaves in the fall, pine needles
in the spring.Just after I rake up the pine
needles, weeds begin popping up.They piss
me off.It’s not just one weed, it’s a
whole gang of weeds that pop up one after another, starting in the spring right
through to fall.I can predict the
buggers.How can I be an optimistic
gardener with dropping leaves, falling pine needles, and those damned weeds? And then there’s that yellow gunk?Stuffs up my head.Hell, it’s like my highfalutin daughter,
changing clothes and make-up three times a day.I just don’t know what this world is coming to.

Dear Pissed Off:

It’s hard to tell
what the world’s coming to: big bang, fizzling out, or Second Coming.If we knew the future, we’d probably go into
a deep funk.

Sounds like you’re
pissed at your highfalutin daughter and are taking it out on your garden. As for your highfalutin daughter, I’m mute,
having a wife, a daughter, and a granddaughter.If Freud didn’t know what women want, he’d be bamboozled by teenage
daughters.Between pine needles, leaves,
weeds, and your daughter, it’s no wonder you’re dyspeptic.

DearGarden
Optimist:

Now,
don’t go giving me a lot of that head shrinky stuff about my daughter and
women.I want to know about pine
needles, leaves, and weeds.

Dear Pissed Off:

Okay. As for the
pine needles and leaves, I assume you change clothes at night and in the
morning.

The needles and
leaves are nature changing clothes, only it just drops them on the floor for gardeners
to rake up.That yellow gunk is a sign
of new growth.It’s called candling.I hope you’re not some kind of primitive who
doesn’t pick up after himself.I knew a
guy once who thought that picking up clothes was a woman’s job because his
mother did it.He’d been married and
divorced seven times, and when I knew him, he lived in a hovel by himself.

Fundamentally,
gardening is yin yang.For every up,
there’s a down, so stop griping.If
there weren’t any falling pine needles and leaves, the trees would be
dead.It’s important during those times
to remember yin times, freshly picked tomatoes while you’re extracting a pine
needle from your under your finger nail.Carl Jung said, “Everyone carries a shadow.”Raking leaves and pine needles and picking
weeds is the shadow side of gardening.

DearGarden
Optimist:

Okay. I get the
ying yan idea.Leaves and pine needles I
can take, but it’s those damned weeds.I’d swear there’s a weed of the week, starting in the middle of March
right through to Thanksgiving. You sound
like one of them believers.My daughter
calls God a She.What’s this world
coming to?

Dear Pissed Off:

God
is more complex than He or She and certainly more than It, as the secular
flatliners would have it.When Moses
asked God what He was like, God replied, “I Am.”

Alert
gardeners use leaves for mulch and their composters.Pine needles can be ground up and used for
mulch and for paths.

As
for weeds, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.Some people like dandelions.Weeds are plants you don’t want.Pick weeds early before they go to seed.In the meantime, thank God you can pull
weeds, rake pine needles, and smell fallen leaves.It means you’re alive which, as Maurice
Chevalier said, is a lot better than the alternative.Also, enjoy you highfalutin daughter while she’s
home.She’ll be gone all too soon.

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Chheten
Tamang was raised and lived as a young adult in a village of five or six rock
houses in the LangtangValley at about 12,500 feet in the HimalayanMountains
of Nepal.Her ancestors were Tibetans who had crossed
the mountains and settled in Nepal.They had no written language.When she came to America, she couldn’t read or
write.She didn’t know our Arabic
numeral system, making it impossible for her to add and subtract, much less multiply
and divide.

In Nepal she was a
farmer, growing potatoes, barley, buckwheat, and vegetables, such as cabbage.She was also a sometime porter for Himalayan
expeditions, carrying one hundred pound packs for fifty cents a day, shod only
in flip-flops (called Chinese sandals in Nepal) over ice-covered rivers.Her father herded yaks in the meadows high above
her village.Her uncle wove woolen rugs,
using the yak’s wool.Her life was hard,
simple, and rewarding.

With her son,
Nirmal, she came to the United States
as the wife of Wayne Gramzinski to visit his family and decided to stay, living
in Flagstaff.She is a remarkable woman, strong,
intelligent, and affectionate.Through
The Literacy Center, Lori Crowe and I worked together with her for almost six
years, teaching her American customs, reading and writing the English language,
and mathematics.Indeed, she has written
several articles for this column.For
Lori and me, it has been immensely rewarding, chiefly because she’s such a
wonderful woman.Also, we have been
beguiled by her Nepalese culture and family.It has been almost as though we were cultural midwives giving birth to
an American while keeping her roots high in the HimalayanMountains.

She
can now read and write English, sometimes with unusual grammar, and with Lori’s
tutoring she is beginning to master the basic elements of mathematics.She has obtained a driver’s license and is
working toward her citizenship.She is
the kind of person who will make an outstanding citizen, hardworking,
intelligent, and ambitious.It was
almost as though she were on the cusp of finding her way to success, working
and saving to send money back to help her family in Nepal.With the help of friends, she funded the
construction of the first bathroom in her village with running water, shower,
and flush toilet for the villagers and passing trekkers.Her brother was the builder.She even dreamt of taking and passing the GED
so that she could get better jobs.

Then
the earthquake struck Nepal,
wiping out her village in the stroke of a landslide and killing most of her
family and friends.One of her sisters
and her sister’s husband were killed in that landslide, leaving their children
orphaned.Chheten and Wayne hope to
adopt those orphaned children and bring them to America, but there many more
orphaned children in her extended family that need care.These children were in boarding schools in Kathmandu when the earthquake struck, and now they have
no homes and no parents to whom they can return.It is almost as though they were lost in
space.

Chheten’s
sorrow is so deep that it seems without bottom, unfathomable, too deep for
words.A once vital woman is now bent
with sorrow.She’s not merely grateful
to be alive.As a means of assuaging her
grief, she wants to help what remains of her family and the survivors from her
village.The village will be no
more.Her father’s herd of yaks was
wiped out, annihilated.Thomas Wolf wrote,
You Can’t Go Home Again.

What
remains is Chheten’s will.She and Wayne
own a house in Kathmandu which survived the
earthquake because it was built with concrete and steel re-enforcing rods.They want to add to it to make it into a
hostel for those lost children with house mothers and fathers from the
surviving adults of her family.

One
of the great cultural values Lori and I have learned from Chheten is the
family, the sense of familial solidarity.She and Wayne need our help so that she can care for her family.She can be reached at (928) 266-0180.